What’s the Significance of a Collection of Dead Trees?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: So, tell me what it is, because it’s dead trees but it’s not about dead trees.

MAYA LIN, ARTIST AND ARCHITECT: Well, there is a phenomenon going on around the world, they’ve been termed ghost forests due to climate change, vast tracts of forest land are dying out. Where I spend my summers in Colorado, it’s beetle infestations because the winters are just too mild. The insects are not dying. And one season, you’ll see a little bit of rust on the tops of the trees, by next season, entire forest kind of have died off. These phenomena is happening in California. It’s forest fires in the East Coast. It’s rising sea salt water inundation. So, I was invited in to do a temporary artwork for Madison Square Park, which is a beautiful one-and-a-half-acre site in the middle of downtown Manhattan. And I wanted to bring a ghost forest to Manhattan and I wanted to raise awareness about these phenomena that’s going on, a huge loss that is going on that people might not be aware of in my art. I really like to connect you to what’s in your own backyard. So, these trees that we — that I brought in and installed, there are 49 of them. They’re from the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and they have all — they’re all victims of salt water inundation from a flooding estuary that come in and overrun its banks.

AMANPOUR: So, tell me, Maya, how you got all these trees and what your visual was? I mean, they clearly all look very uniform, same size. How deep did you have to plant them and how long will they stay there?

LIN: The installation will see it through all four seasons. We’ve begun it with no leaves on the beautiful stately trees around it. Spring is now in full bloom. Summer will come. Fall, the leaves will drop. And we’ll deinstall the peace in November when all the leaved have dropped off the trees. So, I’m trying to capture as well as these trees continue to gray out and, in a way, start to decay, then the leaving forests, the nature surrounding it kind of goes through all its life cycles as well. But as well, I didn’t want to, at this late stage, with where we are with the dire effects of climate change, we are emphasizing through public programs and through 1,000 trees being planted in the fall that will within 10 years more than 10-fold offset the costs of our install in terms of carbon emissions that we really wanted to focus on nature-based solutions to climate change. Because I didn’t want to just wake you up to climate change, I think we don’t have much time left.